The Brimming Cup. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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СКАЧАТЬ To tell the truth they always sounded to him more or less "showing-off," though he humbly tried to think it was only because he could never take any part in such talk. He certainly did not see anything in the speech to make Vincent look at her, almost with his jaw dropped. He himself paid little attention to what she was now saying, because he could not keep his mind from the lingering sweet intonations of her voice. What difference did it make where she had lived as a little girl? She was going to live next door to him now; what an awfully nice woman she was, and quite a good-looking woman too, with a very nice figure, although not in her very first youth, of course. How old could she be? Between thirty and forty of course, but You couldn't tell where. His personal taste was not for such a long face as hers. But you didn't notice that when she smiled. He liked the way she did her black hair, too, so smooth and shining and close to her head. It looked as though she'd really combed and brushed it, and most women's hair didn't.

      She turned to him now, again, and said, "Is this your very first call in Ashley? Because if it is, I mustn't miss the opportunity to cut in ahead of all the other gossips, and give you a great deal of information. You might just as well have it all in one piece now, and get it straight, as take it in little snippets from old Mrs. Powers, when she comes to bring your milk, this evening. You see I know that you are to get your milk of the Powers, and that they have plucked up courage to ask you eight cents a quart although the price around here has been, till now, six cents. You'll be obliged to listen to a great many more details from Mrs. Powers than from me, even those she knows nothing about. But of course you must be introduced to the Powers, in toto too. Old Mrs. Powers, a very lively old widow, lives on her farm nearly at the foot of Deer Hollow. Her married son and his family live with her. In this house, there is first of all my husband. I'm so sorry he is away in Canada just now, on lumbering business. He is Neale Crittenden, a Williams man, who in his youth had thoughts of exploring the world but who has turned out head of the 'Crittenden Manufacturing Company,' which is the high-sounding name of a smallish wood-working business on the other side of the field next our house. You can see the buildings and probably hear the saws from your garden. Properly speaking, you know, you don't live in Ashley but in 'Crittenden's' and your house constitutes one quarter of all the residences in that settlement. There are yours, and ours, the mill-buildings, the house where an old cousin of mine lives, and the Powers' house, although that is so far away, nearly half a mile, that it is really only a farm-house in the country. We, you see, are the suburb of Ashley."

      Marsh laughed out again at this, and she laughed with him, their eyes, shining with amusement, meeting in a friendly glance.

      "The mill is the most important member of Crittenden's, of course. Part of the mill-building is pre-Revolutionary, and very picturesque. In the life-time of my husband's uncle, it still ran by water-power with a beautiful, enormous old mossy water-wheel. But since we took it over, we've had to put in modern machinery very prosaically and run it on its waste of slabs, mostly. All sorts of small, unimportant objects are manufactured there, things you never heard of probably. Backs of hair-brushes, wooden casters to put under beds and chairs, rollers for cotton mills. As soon as my husband returns, I'll ask him to take you through it. That and the old church are the only historic monuments in town."

      She stopped and asked him meditatively, "What else do you suppose I need to forestall old Mrs. Powers on? My old Cousin Hetty perhaps. She has a last name, Allen—yes, some connection with Ethan Allen. I am, myself. But everybody has always called her Miss Hetty till few people remember that she has another name. She was born there in the old house below 'the Burning,' and she has lived there for eighty years, and that is all her saga. You can't see her house from here, but it is part of Crittenden's all the same, although it is a mile away by the main road as you go towards the Dug-Way. But you can reach it in six or seven minutes from here by a back lane, through the Eagle Rock woods."

      "What nice names!" Mr. Welles luxuriated in them. "The Eagle Rock woods. The Dug-Way. The Burning. Deer Hollow."

      "I bet you don't know what they mean," Vincent challenged him. Vincent was always throwing challenges, at everything. But by this time he had learned how to dodge them. "No, I don't know, and I don't care if I don't," he answered happily.

      It pleased him that Mrs. Crittenden found this amusing, so that she looked at him laughing. How her eyes glistened when she laughed. It made you laugh back. He risked another small attempt at facetiousness. "Go on with the census of Crittenden's," he told her. "I want to know all about my future fellow-citizens. You haven't even finished up this house, anybody but your husband."

      "There is myself. You see me. There is nothing more to that. And there are the three children, Paul, Elly, and Mark, … " She paused here rather abruptly, and the whimsical accent of good-humored mockery disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she looked somehow scared—but of course that was preposterous.

      "Your call," she told them both, "happens to fall on a day which marks a turning-point in our family life. This is the very first day in ten years, since Paul's birth, that I have not had at least one of the children beside me. Today is the opening of spring term in our country school, and my little Mark went off this morning, for the first time, with his brother and sister. I have been alone until you came." She stopped for a moment. Mr. Welles wished that Vincent could get over his habit of staring at people so. She went on, "I have felt very queer indeed, all day. It's as though … you know, when you have been walking up and up a long flight of stairs, and you go automatically putting one foot up and then the other, and then suddenly … your upraised foot falls back with a jar. You've come to the top, and, for an instant, you have a gone feeling without your stairs to climb."

      It occurred to Mr. Welles that really perhaps the reason why some nice ladies did not like Vincent was just because of his habit of looking at them so hard. He could have no idea how piercingly bright his eyes looked when he fixed them on a speaker like that. And now Mrs. Crittenden was looking back at him, and would notice it. He could understand how a refined lady would feel as though somebody were almost trying to find a key-hole to look in at her—to have anybody pounce on her so, with his eyes, as Vincent did. She couldn't know, of course, that Vincent went pouncing on ladies and baggagemen and office boys, and old friends, just the same way. He bestirred himself to think of something to say. "I wish I could get up my nerve to ask you, Mrs. Crittenden, about one other person in this house," he ventured, "the old woman … the old lady … who let us in the door."

      At the sound of his voice Mrs. Crittenden looked away from Vincent quickly and looked at him for a perceptible moment before she heard what he had said. Then she explained, smiling, "Oh, she would object very much to being labeled with the finicky title of 'lady.' That was Touclé, our queer old Indian woman—all that is left of old America here. She belongs to our house, or perhaps I should say it belongs to her. She was born here, a million years ago, more or less, when there were still a few basket-making Indians left in the valley. Her father and mother both died, and she was brought up by the old Great-uncle Crittenden's family. Then my husband's Uncle Burton inherited the house and brought his bride here, and Touclé just stayed on. She always makes herself useful enough to pay for her food and lodging. And when his wife died an elderly woman, Touclé still just stayed on, till he died, and then she went right on staying here in the empty house, till my husband and I got here. We were married in Rome, and made the long trip here without stopping at all. It was dawn, a June morning, when we arrived. We walked all the way from the station at Ashley out to the old house, here at Crittenden's. And … I'll never forget the astounded expression on my husband's face when Touclé rose up out of the long grass in the front yard and bade me welcome. She'd known me as a little girl when I used to visit here. She will outlive all of us, Touclé will, and be watching from her room in the woodshed chamber on the dawn of Judgment Day when the stars begin to fall."

      Mr. Welles felt a trifle bewildered by this, and showed it. She explained СКАЧАТЬ